The ext filesystem was originally developed to overcome the limitations of the MINIX filesystem..
MINIX was linus Torvalds' inspiration for linux.
The second extended filesystem (ext2) improved upon it, while the third extended filesystem (ext3) added joumaling, as well as performance improvements. The fourth extended filesystem (exl4) added additional features and performance improvements.
• The ability to disable joumaling is one reason ext2 was sometimes used over ext3 for flash drives in order to reduce the write cycles.
